Songs for Spring
by EnjoyingObsession
Summary: SPRING AWAKENING A series of poetic drabbles for each song in Spring Awakening.
1. Mama Who Bore Me

_No sleep in heaven or Bethlehem _

She lies awake, unable to bring herself to dream, because with those wonderful, sinful dreams, comes the morning. The mornings wrench her from beauty and the glory that cannot be explained. She finds no answers in musty textbooks that pile up in her father's locked study or in the fresh faces of the younger, still running around without stockings in the schoolyard. They laugh and shriek, high and carelessly while Wendla sits by the side, hunching over in her too-small kindergarten smock that doesn't cover her pink thighs. And so she continues to pull her mind from sleep, at least until this terrible, beautiful pleasure and paralyzing awkwardness comes to pass.

Perhaps she is developing pneumonia.


	2. Mama Who Bore Me Reprise

_No way to handle things_

Thea and Anna pound along the road, skipping, jumping, letting their woolen dresses blow in the cool air that whooshes past them. They play a game, who will let their dress fly the highest. Anna giggles, she is modest but she wants to impress Thea, hear Thea's praise and hold her warm, sweaty hand as she did last Sunday after church. Anna's dress flies up and catches the breeze, exposing her underclothes for just a fraction of a second and Thea claps, both giggling, but Anna is embarrassed. For she has been taught this game is not for children like herself, not for skinny, pretty Thea who is almost eight months younger.

Thea twirls around merrily, letting her frock become a ballroom gown that spreads out in the wind. She throws her head back and laughs, tight braids swinging. All is perfect and right with the world until Thea spots Georg and Otto in the distance. She runs into the woods, pushing her dress down as Anna runs after her, calling her name, bewildered by the boys' sudden appearance and Thea's embarrassment because she thought this wonderful game was only for the two of them.


	3. All That's Known

_Blind men_

It is two o'clock in the morning and Moritz tries to stay coherent, tries to go through his impossible studies just one more time. Running grubby fingers through his unruly curls, he makes another effort at brilliance, the kind of brilliance only his classmate Melchior seems to have. The kind of brilliance his father would like to see, and Moritz _will_please him, one day. Oh, he tries, he studies, and he fails again, going through his notebooks and tearing out anything wrong and hoping, just hoping he will be good enough this next time. Love him, oh why won't his father love him? This semester, this week, today…next time he will succeed and his father will understand why he spends long nights at his desk, waiting for second chances.


	4. Bitch of Living

_So not life at all_

They stumble through adolescence, blind to desire, wishing only for the nonexistent purity preached to them by those caricatures of authority. Made up laws of society push them into disrepair, grabbing at any bit of nature they can show down their knickers in private. How have we gotten so far from our path, that music must be stolen in rare moments of rebellion?

So the boys huddle in concentrated silence in the classroom, in tight-knit huddles in the yard as they try to win at this game, to find their existence more than, well…a bitch.


	5. My Junk

_You is some song_

He thinks love is music, climbing up and down the scales, gathering fervor and then declining into cadences. Georg cannot feel love until he memorizes _Prelude in C Sharp Minor _and so he sits at the piano, day and night, waiting for love to bloom from the smooth white keys and cold brass petals. Thea passes by outside, waves, scrunching her pretty face into that gummy smile but he will only glance up and then go back to the minor triads he hates and adores and wishes he could exude quite as easily as his beautiful teacher. Oh why can he not lay back and let his fingers dance so skillfully as he has seen her do ones thousand times before? So he he practices and let the notes consume him until he can fall in love again.


	6. Touch Me

_Now that I like_

A mist settles over the village, clouding the homes in pale grey veils. The afternoon slows down, blurred by the dismal weather and fatigue that creeps into the crevices of the buildings. It seems gloomy, but Thea loves every minute of it, every drop precipitation that will eventually fall. She lies in trigonometry with her head on her hands, playing out the events that have taken place that mornings. The boys that greeted her, so rambunctiously as if they understood something she didn't. Well, they didn't know anything, no one did, except perhaps Melchior Gabor, who didn't need to study for history _or _science. Beautiful Melchi with his dark hair...and Georg who used to play dolls with her until he was seven and had to learn to feed the horses...shy Ernst who would wave because the other boys did.

This is why Thea adores the foggy days that bring her into her girlish mind. They are such pleasant thoughts, she believes.


	7. The Word of Your Body

_too unreal_

And Wendla lies on her back, soiled cotton dress sprawled over her thighs, her legs splayed immodestly. She clutches his hand, _Melchior's_ hand and feel his plump fingers and sweaty palms against hers. She is enthralled with his voice, his expressive speech, his dark eyes that focus on her and not any other girls or a thousand little distractions. He speaks and she listens, then drifts off into a land she know she has been before, a place so close, and yet behind the wall of dreams. I am infatuated, Wendla tells herself, willing herself to believe that with all her might this is not love, not the kind of love that brought Inge the baby. Of course not, for Wendla is a child, and so is her wonderful Melchior and nothing could come of his stroking her messy hair.


	8. The Dark I Know Well

_ain't it good tonight_

Pushing herself against the bedroom door, she's shivering but stands tall against the yelling outside. Not tonight, Martha, she commands herself. Not this night. _You open that goddamn door, child! What if there was a fire? What would I tell your mother: she wanted to be alone. I'll teach you to be alone…_

She musters all her strength, guarding that door as if the piece of wood could protect her life, or her dirtied innocence. He slams against it from the other side, roaring with efforts. It swings open noisily, hurtling her across the room. He closes the door quietly and suddenly that door, that lifeline, locks her in her own filthy hell.

It starts and he talks to her during it, grossly, dirtily. _Like that? Slut. _She pulls herself into her mind and runs through the alphabet, one letter at a time._ L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T..._

_You lose._


	9. And Then There Were None

_hardly the solution_

Moritz kicks back on his bed, scuffed boots flopping over the edge, dirty against the faded linen sheets. Tomorrow will be Thursday, and then Friday and then the _weekend_. He will pack his carpet bag, a present for his ninth birthday…as if Moritz was going anywhere at the time, just a silly child who didn't do his mathematics and played in the mud with the other ignorant village kids. Nothing had changed and Moritz has been nowhere in fourteen years, only as far as the larger town two miles away. So he's running away toward freedom, towards the grit and hustle of the cities he has only imagined, and away from pages and pages of false knowledge. A muffled ache in his brain tells him he is wrong to run away, but he can see no easier alternative.

Ilse ran away. She left her home one year ago. They used to be friends, when he was five and she was seven. They played, crouching near the ground by the forest, her long, tangled hair swinging by her back, his grubby knees bare. But Ilse was strange, different from the other children, and she left her parents when she was fifteen and never returned. Not that her reputation changed anything for Moritz, and yet every so often she seemed to appear back in the village, skin glowing, hair tangled, with exciting and awful stories with which to tease the girls who dared speak to her.

Running away, it is barely a cure for sadness, but it will have to do, at least for now.


	10. The Mirror Blue Night

_broken inside_

Melchior's thoughts seems to wander from ever day life more and more, pulling him back into his head, into the endless questions only he can answer. Unsatisfied, he pours his wondering on paper, shoved carelessly into the leather journal he knows must be replaced soon.

_Desire, it seems, is a paradox. To give in to the waves of wanting is to give into the prescribed order of nature. To cave in to your desire is to follow a carefully outlined plan, written only by the laws of science. And yet, this total obedience of natural longing is also a rebellion against human-made laws f social behaviour. Ironic how these laws seem to totally contradict each other. Resisting so-called "sin" is giving in to senseless confines of a terribly flawed society, but to rebel against actual laws of the universe. Perhaps it is in this way, trapped between the unbreakable laws of both society and nature, we can make sensible choices, quite on or own._

Melchior shuts the books abruptly, puts his thoughts away with his pens, and lets his mind wander toward beautiful Wendla.


	11. I Believe

_oh, I believe_

And yet there is a part of Melchior that knows not all is lost- there is hope, hope evident in Thea's giggling and Hanschen's smirks and the dew drops that hover on the tip of every strand of morning grass. He watches Wendla sneakily hitch her dress up when her mother doesn't watch…pushing her stockings down to her knees, he catches a glimpse of that pale pink thigh, of lace unseen. Oh, how he would love to trail his fingers down her legs, so shapely when revealed as she curls up in a chair, legs bent at the knees, with her calves curving into thinner ankles and dirty black shoes. Melchior believes someday he might know the absolute ecstasy of everything around him that is hidden.

If only he could explain this utter wanting to Morit, though he would never understand. To Moritz, bliss was approval; happiness was passing under the nasty glares of teachers and his stern parents. All he wanted in this world, in this life, was to make the grade and earn his keep. Melchior loves him, but he is a pathetic child. He reminds Melchior of a faithful but blind dog, wanting so badly to be loved, not knowing his owners had moved away.


	12. The Guilty Ones

_this is the reason for dreaming_

Wendla is everywhere and nowhere at once, possessing the world and her thoughts in a way she never has been able to. How could she have understood that moments ago she was a girl, and now she is a person, a full person. An awakening stirs her, moves through her legs and arms and her belly, tingling her skin. Something was changed forever, and yet Wendla liked it this way. She liked this mysterious beauty.

Oh Melchior, she hoped he felt as she did now for it was only with his guidance that she reached this place. And Wendla knows now the place we all strive to get to, when alone under a lazy tree, or wrapped in the dark covers at night.


	13. Don't Do Sadness

_they come to set you free_

Sadness is not real, Moritz has decided. It is artificial, created by the demons so spoken about in church every Sunday. Sadness is a disease, a mental wrongness that leads on to believe there is some sort of cure.

He laughs harshly. There is no cure. Happiness is a place and time in the past that cannot be reached for all the money in the world. Moritz knows now that it doesn't matter how much he studies- he is afflicted by this illness this constant gloom and forbidding paranoia. Death is the only reasonable escape and in no way can it be any more painful than sorrow.

Moritz pulls open the drawer in his father's desk shakily as the wood rattles in his clenched fists. Out comes a dark pistol. The answer to all this madness. He hurries outside, his strides long, boots pounding against the dirt. The devil has possessed him but in the settling twilight of that April evening, the demons shall let him go.


	14. Blue Wind

_so lost_

She is a sight to see- barefoot, her dirty feet scuffed and swollen. Her oversized man's shirt trails only down to her exposed plump thighs and her tangled hair cascades down to her waist, thinning off into brittle frizz.

Ilse doesn't know who she is or what she is anymore… somewhere between an artist and a prostitute, a maiden and a whore. She is beautiful only to those who appreciate mournful grey eyes, pale skin, broad shoulders and wide set hips. Perhaps she will find someone to love her, to love Ilse and not this apparition that painters dream of erotically and her village is embarrassed to remember. Or maybe love is a fairytale, a false hope. You chase it through the woods, splashing through freezing creeks hoping to catch another glimpse of its shadow, never finding that eluding pixie.

Poor Moritz- that nervous wreck she has met at a crossroads. She, returning to the place of her fading childhood, and him, escaping it. Could she have saved Moritz from certain tragedy or was his saga inevitable? How could Ilse, barely sixteen herself and nothing more than a Bohemian skank have made any possible difference to this childhood friend?

Suicide is a knife left on the kitchen table. Someone, sometime, must put it back in its proper drawer and restore order, if grief, to the room.


	15. Left Behind

_A shadow past_

They gather around his grave awkwardly, huddling against the cool April wind. The air nips at Thea's pink fingers, kissing Otto's chapped lips and swirling around Anna's curls. A crow watching the scenario from an oak tree flies away as soon as the sermon starts, his heavy wings flapping loudly against the breeze.

The minister preaches, his voice heavy and deep, his German rough and guttural. Martha looks down at her scuffed boots as the priest lectures on disobedience. Georg shifts his weight from one foot to another, bored.

From a distance, Ilse stands back, watching the funeral as she rubs one foot against another, trying to keep warm. The wind tosses her hair back, creeps up through her dress and tickles her body.

* * *

The last few stragglers fade away- Melchior with red eyes, squinting in the sun, Moritz's parents, stony-faced and decked out in their Sunday best. Mrs. Stiefel's grey silk scarf floats behind her as she hurries off back toward the village. 

The only one left is Martha, leaning over the freshly dug grave, her fists clenched against the cold. She opens one hand to touch a coarse black braid absentmindedly. Then, in one motion, Martha takes a few spring daisies out of her pinafore pocket and tosses them into the grave, watching them land gracelessly in a pile.

"They'll die, you know," says Ilse softly from behind. "It's cold."

Martha breathes out. "I'll bring more. Later."

Creeping up to her, Ilse gently puts a hand on her arm.

"Like October frost," Martha mutters. "But it's nearly May."

Ilse steps back, letting Martha turn around to see her in full. Ilse knows she must look a sight, in a baggy old shirt, her face pale and round.

"You haven't been around here much," Martha states.

Ilse agrees. "No." She smiles weakly and swings her arms up and down.

Martha glances down, considering Ilse's bare feet and soiled underwear, visible when her clothes waved in the draught.

"Come. I'll help you pick flowers."

Martha looks up, shaking her head slightly, and, perhaps, smiling.

A few dried leaves blow away, their curling brown tips rustling against the trees.


	16. Totally Fucked

**Note: As one of my astute fans realized, this _is _a scene out of the original play and not musical. I did not count on most of my readers to notice this and so I did not keep the original professors' names (Flykiller, etc.) as I thought most of you would find this childish, not realizing the teachers in _The Tragedy of Spring's Awakening _caricatures of themselves.**

* * *

_blah blah blah _

"It's an outbreak," says the Professor Krause. "An epidemic. A disease." He shakes his head, displeased with his verdict.

"That's nonsense," announces Fraulein Schulze. "The boy was troubled in the head. He was unintelligent. You may ask his teachers, of whom he was not fond."

She taps the blackboard with a stick.

"It won't happen again. I promise you. It's thoroughly uncontagious, a private illness."

Krause emits a heavy sighs and snaps his briefcase shut with a click.

"The institution will be cast in a negative light, my dear Edelgard. We must take some preventative steps against backlash. We must be seen to do_something_."

A black fly flutters in through the window, dancing above the nearly empty classroom, casting a speck of shadow against the floor.

Fraulein Schulze says "Then the cause must be found. Found and eliminated as quickly as possible."

"Close the window, Stefan," Professor Neumann pipes up from the corner.

"But it's warm in here! The window must remain open," Schulze says hotly.

The fly crawls across a desk, leaving miniscule footprints in the dust. Professor Krause wipes his forehead with a handkerchief.

"Insects will blow in, Ms. Schulze."

"Call me Edelgard."

"There is already a fly. Am I not right?"

"Ulrich, let's try to stay on topic. The child has planted a seemingly fashionable idea in the minds of his peers. We must remove that idea," Krause interjects.

"It is a tiny fly and I am sweating. Leave it open. Besides, it's a nuisance to shut, what with the latch."

Krause cuts in "The latch was fixed last Wednesday."

"And still it doesn't work."

"Be quiet! I will close it myself!" spits out Neumann. He strides off to the back of the room, sunlight sending patterns down his suit.

"It's the fault of Melchior Gabor. He's always been a problem child. Head full of nonsensical ideas and silly proposals," blames Fraulein Schulze. "Why, he hasn't attended church in three Sundays!"

"And keep it closed. I have a lock here, it should fit through the latch," Krause offers.

"But surely the fault is not only his. Punishment should be spread to all those who have provoked the suicide. Am I not right, Stefan?" Neumann tugs on the obstinate window pane. His face turns read, his muscles tighten and he pulls it down with an angry thud.

"No," says Schulze. "If he is the sole perpetrator of the crime, then ridding us of him would rid us of the sole problem."

Krause strokes his mustache. "That is true, Edelgard. And the school board will want definitive action.

Neumann heaves out a breath and clicks the lock on the brittle wooden latch. A chip of white paint scrapes off and lands on his pristine jacket.

"We could speak to his parents. Suspend him, perhaps, if the principal sees fit."

"That won't be enough, "disagrees Krause. "You know the superintendent. And we don't want any jobs in danger."

"Certainly not," huffs Neumann. "This is a one time issue. We can't be losing sleep over Moritz Stiefel's stupidity."

"Well, I say get rid of Gabor and you've killed two birds with one stone. The child himself and the harm he causes to others."

Neumann brushes the paint chip off his suit brusquely.

"It's simple then," Krause announces. "Expel him."

The teachers smile self indulgently. "Yes, I think so.


	17. The Word of Your Body Reprise

_and so you should_

Hanschen grasps at ecstasy, so close to him, just beyond his reach. He kisses Ernst with a gentle fervour that masks his strange perversity, his delight in that which is most sinful. Ernst is a child of fourteen; he hasn't yet learned of the treasures that lie just between the rules. What a shame, for Ernst's dream, holiness, is merely an illusion, a well thought-out shield, that separates eroticism from every day life. Poor thing.

They break apart for a moment, sucking in air and delight. Ernst's large, dark eyes travel up Hanschen wool vest, past his damp, sweaty neck to his face.

"Ernst, my friend," Hanschen says coldly, "don't you adore me?"

"Um…yes,"

Hanschen smirks triumphantly, touching Ernst's shoulder with a quiet sarcasm.

"I know."


	18. Whispering

_summer longing on the wind_

Springtime tastes like cherry blossoms and faint disaster lingering on the brink of corn fields. It danced tantalizingly by the school children, inviting them into the mist, never to return again.

Ilse's visit comes and goes- she surfaces one June evening like a pretty ghost and disappear three nights later. She stays long enough at the fringes of the village to receive disapproving stares from the men and women who brush by her, forgetting to pretend that they don't know her. Few people speak to her- Moritz, in the woods on that fateful night; Martha at the tail end of his funeral; Georg calls out to her as she leaves, but Ilse rushes on and doesn't respond.

Soon after the mysterious resurfacing of Ilse, Melchior is sent away to a dingy reformatory school "somewhere outside Frankfurt." Georg, Hanschen, Ernst and Otto have an idea of why he is banished; the rest of the village ponders aimlessly in their grief and ignorance.

Wendla does not arrive for school four days in a row. Martha and Thea, ever the concerned friends, visit her house with a basket of cottage cheese pastries that she loves. Her mother turns them away quite suddenly at the door. No explanation is given. The two girls walk home slowly, dragging their black shoes in the dirt as they try to understand the tragic and inexplicable events that keep happening around them.

"Maybe Wendla has consumption. It's an embarrassment, you know. Contagious and everything," Thea ruminates.

"That's nonsense," Martha says. "You can only get consumption from Hanschen, you know."

"Eeew!" squeals Thea. She dances off the road and twirls in the wind, letting her woolen skirts sail around her. The sky is pale grey; clouds bunch together and darken.

"And Melchior liked her," says Martha. "So why should she have spent any time with Hanschen?"

"Maybe it was a _dare_," giggles Thea, as thunder rumbles in the distance.

"But still." Martha attempts to steer the conversation back to more serious matters. "She and Melchior have both disappeared at the same time. It's a bit strange, isn't it?" A cool raindrop slides on to her forehead triumphantly.

"I think Melchior is getting punished," suggests Thea. "For not believing in God. You know what'll happen to you if you don't believe in God?"

Martha looks down and feels her face grow warm, though the charged June air is cool.

"Moritz Stiefel didn't believe in God."

Thea pushes back her skinny braids and swings the basket of pastries back and forth. Suddenly, Martha hikes up her dress and starts off. Jogging at first and then faster and faster along the road she runs, skirts flying wildly in the breeze. The sky bellows again and more raindrops fall down, speckling the earth.

"Martha!" screams Thea. "Where are you off to?"

She pounds the ground faster, far surpassing the cows grazing in the meadow ahead of Thea.

"Martha! Martha!" shrieks Thea. "I didn't mean that, honest!" She squints off into the distance as rain falls down, dampening her skirts resting in beads on her leather shoes.

Wind blows harshly across the fields, pushing the water droplets across the road and the meadows, tangoing in the air until they spatter against a grove of trees. The last days of spring's awakening rain down angrily from the sky until the summer sets in, still and humid after the storm.


	19. Those You've Known

_they tell of spring returning_

The dust settles around Melchior's feet; he walks in clouds of dried leaves and summer dandelions that sprout from between the blades of grass. Butterflies flit across the tombstones that neatly mark the graveyard like a stony chess board, their pretty wings flapping gently.

Moritz is _almost_ here and his presence can sometimes be felt in those moments between the afternoon and evening when all is lazy and hot; the crickets chirp but everything is still and Melchior can taste the anxiety of the coming night radiating from the warm ground. He is not alive, but he exists, or rather, existed, and that must count for something.

Melchior sits by Moritz's grave, crossing his feet underneath him and pulling out his bound leather journal which has grown messy and faded with time. Notes are scrawled illegibly in the margins, and somehow, Wendla's hands upon his most private possession have lent a kind of sweatiness to the cover that Melchior must be imagining.

He pulls out a fountain pen, but does not write. The air hums softly with cicadas and expectations. He is in a cemetery and there are ghosts all around, but they don't speak. They are good ghosts and they merely float unnoticed and invisible around the visitors, peaceful as ants crawling on the dirt. Some of the ghosts kneel by the graves, some lay in the daisies enjoying the sun, and some hover above the scene nervously as they watch the world continue on beneath them.

His diary is closed and laying in his lap on a slant. Melchior's woolen pants are damp with sweat.

"Nineteenth of June, eighteen ninety-four," he muses aloud. "I have come back to the village. It's a beautiful day outside. I can affirm that the world is perfect as it is- only the inhabitants need changing."


	20. The Song of Purple Summer

_some play from the past_

The wind slows to a gentle breeze and finally dies down. Through out the village, young children play in the fields, climbing on bales of hay and sifting through the dirt and mud that cakes the roads.

The older children don't play; they grieve for the season that changed everything. Spring has come and gone; promises were kept and broken. Nothing and everything is different now, like the pale white cherry blossoms that fluttered down from the trees, making room for ripe, plump berries. The world is fluid place; while change is inevitable, ignorance is too, and life goes on with relatively little hindsight.

Perhaps some who knew the story well- Melchior, Martha, Ernst, Ilse, Hanschen, Otto and Georg –have learned a lesson we ought to have taught them long before the tragedy of spring's awakening.

Or, perhaps we must learn this lesson ourselves.


End file.
